Witches

by Colin Wilson

  Skinner tells a story of a man who asked him to consecrate a talisman to cause a certain woman to leave her husband; he refused, but the man consecrated the talisman himself, following instructions from a book on magic. The following day the woman appeared on his doorstep, having left her husband. A few days later, she left him again to return to her husband—Skinner believes this was because the consecration of the talisman was performed without sufficient care. Another magical historian, Francis King, tells how the composer Peter Warlock ignored the advice that no one should use a method of consecrating talismans recommended by Abra-Melin the Mage without first having had contact with one’s ‘Holy Guardian Angel’. (King defines this as the ‘deepest layer of consciousness, the ultimate ego’.) Warlock ignored this advice, and attempted to cause his estranged wife to return to him by lettering one of the Abra-Melin talismans on his arm. She returned to him but left him again, and he committed suicide shortly afterwards.

  The real problem for anyone who studies the ‘magical’ works of such magicians as Cornelius Agrippa or Paracelsus—or a modern compilation like De Laurence’s Great Book of Magical Art—is that they sound so preposterous. The Key of Solomon contains a ritual for preventing huntsmen from harming animals: a rod of green elder has to be hollowed out at both ends, and two small pieces of parchment made from the skin of a hare inserted in either end, one with a drawing of a fish’s skeleton on it, the other with the word ‘Abimegh’. It must be sealed with pitch, fumigated three times with incense on a Friday in February, and buried under an elder tree where the huntsman is expected to pass. Yet before dismissing this as a complete absurdity, consider the story of the stage magician and mind reader Wolf Messing, who fled from Poland to the Soviet Union during the second world war. To demonstrate his powers to Stalin, Messing offered to enter his country dacha without a pass. In fact, he walked coolly into the grounds and past the guards, who stood aside respectfully to let him pass.

  He walked into Stalin’s study, and explained that he had simply used a form of mental suggestion to make the guards think he was Beria, head of the secret police. He also demonstrated his powers by walking into a bank and handing the teller a note apparently asking for 100,000 roubles in cash. Without blinking, the bank clerk handed over the money; five minutes later, accompanied by two bank officials, Messing walked in and handed it back. The bank clerk had a heart attack when he realised that what Messing had handed him was, in fact, a sheet of blank paper. (Both stories can be found in Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain by Schroeder and Ostrander.)

  Messing apparently possessed a power that many ‘psychics’ and magicians have claimed: to influnce other people’s minds. (The playwright Strindberg was convinced he could make himself ‘invisible’ by suggestion.) This is clearly a form of ‘magic’. And if such mental powers could be somehow imprinted upon physical objects, then presumably the magic of the Key of Solomon might also work.

  A major change in the whole magical tradition occurred some time towards the end of the 13th century when a vast commentary on the first five books of Moses, the Zohar, began to be circulated. It seems to have been written—or edited—by a Spanish rabbi, Moses de Leon, but it is the general opinion of scholars that it reaches back at least fifteen centuries before that. It must be remembered that the basic tradition of magic and mysticism is that the material world is only the facade of a far more complex reality—that is, of a spiritual world. What the Kabbalah claims to describe is the structure of this spiritual world. Our material world is an emanation of God; but this is only one of ten. It is, in fact, the lowest. The diagram of the arrangement of these ten ‘emanations’ forms a pattern known as the ‘tree of life’. The ten emanations, or Sephiroth, are joined by twenty two lines, known as paths. The concept has become much easier to grasp since Aldous Huxley’s two little books on mescalin popularised the idea that our ‘inner worlds’ are as vast as the world we live in. Add to that William Blake’s notion that eternity opens from the centre of an atom, and we nave the notion of a spiritual world in another dimension from the physical, which becomes accessible by a kind of descent into oneself.

  The Kabbalah became the basis of the magical ‘systems’ of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and such 20th century occultists as Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune. In effect, the Kabbalah was adapted to the magical system of the gentile world by students like Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Agrippa. Their ‘magic’ is also permeated with the idea of ‘celestial influences’—the planets—and the ‘correspondences' between these influences and terrestrial objects.

  The cabbalistic ‘Tree of Life’.

  CHAPTER 13

  Werewolves

  In his classic study Man into Wolf, the Jungian psychologist Robert Eisler advances the view that man was once a peaceful vegetarian, but that his battles against wild animals gradually developed a blood-lust in him, which reappears among civilised men as sadism and lycanthropy—that is, the delusion of certain madmen that they can turn into wolves.

  In 1521, a traveller in the Poligny district of France was attacked by a wolf; he defended himself so vigorously that he wounded it. Following the trail of blood, he found his way to a hut; inside, to his astonishment, there was a woman who was bathing the wounds of a naked man. The man, Michel Verdung, was arrested, and implicated two more men, Pierre Bourgot and Philibert Mentot. Bourgot confessed that he was a servant of the devil. In 1502, his flocks had been scattered by a storm, and he met three black horsemen, one of whom, named Moyset, offered to help him find his sheep if he would agree to serve him. Pierre agreed, and quickly recovered all his sheep. The man came to claim his reward, and Pierre had to swear fealty to the Devil and kiss the man’s left hand, which was black and cold as ice. When, two years later, Pierre seemed inclined to drift back to church, another servant of the devil, Michel Verdung, was ordered to make him live up to his bargain. Pierre described how he had attended a Sabbat with Verdung, at which he had stripped and been rubbed all over with ointment; he then changed into a wolf. Later, he was rubbed with another ointment, and changed back. Philibert Mentot was also present. Under torture, Pierre Bourgot admitted eating two children—both girls—and to mating with female wolves. The other two also admitted to this practice and said it gave them as much pleasure as mating with their wives. All three were burned.

  In 1573, there were a number of attacks on young children in Dôle, Franche-Comté. On November 9 of that year, peasants heard a child screaming and found her being attacked by a large wolf, which fled on their approach. A few days later, when a small boy was missing, a peasant named Gilles Garnier was arrested; he was a recluse who lived in a remote hut near Armanges with his wife. Garnier confessed to all the attacks on children. In August, he had attacked and killed a twelve year old boy in a pear orchard. About to eat him, he was forced to flee by the approach of some men. On this occasion, he was in his own shape. But in October he had changed into a wolf, and killed and ate a ten year old girl. He enjoyed her flesh so much that he took some home for his wife. In November he attacked another girl, but was forced to flee when people approached. And on November 15, just before his arrest, he had killed a ten year old boy—again in his animal shape—and eaten one of his legs. Garnier was burned alive in January 1574.

  In 1598, a sixteen year old boy named Benoit Bidel of Naizan, in the Jura, was found dying at the foot of a tree from a stab wound. He claimed that he had been up a tree picking fruit, leaving his sister below, when the girl was attacked by a wolf. Benoit climbed down to help her, flourishing his knife. He claimed that the wolf had human hands instead of forepaws, and that it snatched his knife and stabbed him. Benoit then died. Peasants searching the area found a semi-imbecile girl named Perrenette Gandillon, whom they took to be the werewolf, and killed her.

  Peasants recalled that Perrenette’s brother Pierre had a strangely unpleasant appearance, as if scarred with scratches. He was also arrested, together with his sister Antoinette and his son George. All three con
fessed to attending Sabbats and turning themselves into wolves with ‘salve’ or ointment. Judge Henri Boguet, author of a famous Discourse on Sorceres, visited the three self-confessed werewolves in jail, and said they ran around on all fours. When he asked them to turn themselves into wolves, they replied that this was impossible, since they had no ointment or salve.

  It is interesting to note that Pierre Gandillon had fallen into trance on Maundy Thursday, and when he recovered, claimed that his spirit had attended a Sabbat of werewolves. It raises the question of whether some self-confessed werewolves may have been in a state of trance or ‘astral projection’, like the porpoise-caller described by Grimble (See Introduction). Again, there are circumstantial confessions by witches in which they describe flying through the air after anointing themselves with a 'flying ointment’, and the occult-histonan Stephen Skinner has raised the question of whether the ointment itself may have had certain hallucinatory properties; many hallucinatory drugs—of the same type as the peyotl cactus—can be found in common flowers in the hedgerow.

  In the same year—1598—a beggar named Jacques Roulet was charged with being a werewolf. A group of armed men had come upon the mutilated body of a boy and thought they saw two wolves running away. They gave chase and cornered a ‘wolf ’—only to find that it was a filthily clad man, who had blood on his face and beard. Tried at Angers, Roulet admitted to being a loup garou and attacking children. Asked if his hands became paws, he answered yes; but admitted that he was not sure whether his head became a wolfs head. The questions reveal that the court was sceptical; and, in fact, Roulet escaped with two years in an asylum.

  Another case in which a court declined to believe that ‘shape-shifting’ was possible was that of Jean Grenier, reported by Pierre de Lancre, magistrate and well-known writer on witchcraft and sorcery. In 1603, in the department of Les Landes, an odd-looking youth got into conversation with some girls tending sheep, and announced that he was a werewolf and had eaten girls. He had black hair and prominent teeth, and (as later evidence showed) was mentally defective. But since a number of children had been killed in the area, and three girls claimed to have been attacked by him, Grenier was arrested. He implicated his father and a neighbour, M. del Thillaire, who were also arrested and tortured. His father pointed out that his son was widely known to be an idiot, and that he claimed to have slept with every woman for miles around. What seems certain is that Jean was sexually overdeveloped, and spent much of his time lying in the undergrowth near a pool where girls went to bathe. He claimed to have attacked two naked girls and killed one of them, dragging her off and eating her over two days (which is clearly impossible). Jean claimed that M. del Thillaire had taken him into the forest when he was ten and introduced him to a ‘black man’, who ‘signed’ him with his nail and gave him a wolf skin and a salve to turn himself into a wolf.

  The Parlement of Bordeaux reviewed the case, sent two doctors to look at Grenier, and accepted their report that Jean was an imbecile who suffered from a mental malady known as lycanthropy—that is, he suffered from the delusion that he changed into a wolf. And so Jean was condemned to imprisonment in a local monastery, and the two men were released. De Lancre went to see Jean two years later, and describes him as of small stature, very shy—he would not look anyone in the face—and with black teeth and nails.

  Although he still maintained he had been a werewolf and eaten children, he otherwise seemed to be unable to understand the simplest questions. He died in 1610, ‘as a good Christian’, at the age of twenty. Grenier was undoubtedly lucky; Bordeaux was one of the major centres of witch persecution at this period.

  The most extreme sentence passed on a ‘werewolf ’ was that delivered in the case of Peter Stubbe or Stumpf in 1589. There had been a large number of wolf attacks in the Cologne area of Germany, and matters came to a head when a wolf attacked a group of children playing in the meadows and tried to tear out the throat of one child; fortunately, she wore a high, stiff collar. There were cattle nearby with young calves, and they attacked the wolf, which ran away. Men and dogs began to organise into hunts, and one day, a group of hunters came close to capturing the wolf. At this roint, they saw a man with a staff walking towards the city, and decided that—since the wolf had vanished—he must be a werewolf. This was Peter Stubbe. He was arrested and tortured, and had soon confessed to an amazing series of attacks. To begin with, Stubbe confessed to incest with his daughter—with whom he had a child—and his sister; he was living with a woman called Katherine Trompin. The pamphlet ‘translated out of the high Dutch’ and printed in London in June 1590, goes on to assert that the Devil now sent Stubbe a beautiful succubus with whom he lived for seven years. At some point, the Devil gave Stubbe a belt with which he could transform himself into a wolf and—according to the pamphlet—he killed and ate his own son in this guise. Over a period of twenty five years he had ‘destroyed and spoiled an unknown number of men, women and children, sheep, lambs, and goats and other cattle..’

  The magistrates searched for the magic belt in the valley where Stubbe claimed to have hidden it, but were unable to find it; they decided the Devil had taken it back.

  Stubbe seems to have implicated his daughter and mistress in his confession, and they were also tried. They were sentenced to be burned, but Stubbe was sentenced to be broken on a wheel, his flesh pulled off with red hot pincers, and then decapitated. The sentences were carried out on October 31, 1589. The case aroused widespread interest all over Europe, and many commentaries on it exists. But it is difficult not to suspect that Stubbe was merely an unlucky man who happened to be walking past when the wolf disappeared.

  CHAPTER 14

  Dame Alice Kyteler

  Among all the appalling stories of persecution and torture in the history of witchcraft, it is pleasant to read of the case of a woman who gave as good as she got, and escaped with her life. But it seems highly likely that Dame Alice was guilty—if not of witchcraft, then of straightforward poisoning.

  Dame Alice Kyteler, the first Irish witch, lived in Kilkenny in the early years of the fourteenth century—that is, after the burning of the Cathars, but before witchcraft became a crime in itself.

  Dame Alice had been married four times: to William Outlawe, a wealthy banker, who died before 1302, to Adam le Blond, who died about 1311 and to Richard de Valle. Her fourth husband, who was alive but ailing when Dame Alice was charged with sorcery, was Sir John le Poer.

  In 1324, Sir John’s children observed that he was wasting away, his hair coming out in handfuls, and wondered if he was being killed by sorcery. Sir John demanded the key of his wife’s room and finally took them from her forcibly; in the room, he found locked boxes and chests, which proved to contain powders and unguents. Sir John concluded that she was engaging in sorcery. He sent the chests and boxes to the Bishop of Ossory, Richard de Landrede, who had trained in France and knew all about witches and witchcraft. The bishop ordered an investigation, as a result of which he charged Dame Alice and eleven accomplices with heresy, sacrificing to demons, (the chief of whom was called Robin Artison, or Robin son of Art), performing ‘black masses’, and killing her previous husbands by sorcery. The accused included her son, William Outlawe, and her maid Petronilla.

  In Ireland then, as now, the ‘gentry’ were much respected, and the Bishop found it hard to get Dame Alice arrested by officers of the law. He tried excommunicating her, and Dame Alice retaliated by getting him arrested and lodged in Kilkenny jail. He was kept there for seventeen days, then released. He meanwhile placed the whole diocese under interdict and censure, but the Lord Justice, Sir Arnold le Poer (probably a relative of Dame Alice’s husband) appealed to Dublin, charging an illegal ban, and the Bishop had to lift it. Next time the Lord Justice held court, the Bishop turned up carrying the sacrament, and a vigorous war of words ensued, which ended with the Bishop being thrown out. He came a second time to demand the arrest of Dame Alice and her son; again he was thrown out.

  Dame Alice, still
determined, had the Bishop summoned to Dublin to answer for having excommunicated her when she was as yet unconvicted of sorcery. The court was against the Bishop; but he seems to have been a singularly stubborn man, and persisted; the court finally agreed that Dame Alice and the Lord Justice were in the wrong in refusing to submit to the law. Sir Arnold had to apologise, and to agree to do his duty. Dame Alice decided to flee to England. Her son, William Outlawe, was arrested, and spent nine weeks in jail. He decided to confess to all the charges—probably having been assured that he would be let off with a penance. So it was; he was made to re-roof the Cathedral at his own expense, and make a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury. The other eight people charged also decided that it would be simplest to confess and to lay all the blame on Dame Alice. The maid Petronilla, after being flogged six times, confessed to all kinds of wickedness, including having sex with Robin Artison, and working a spell against her own husband. She was sentenced to death and burned. The others were sentenced to be whipped in the market place and through the streets of Kilkenny. Dame Alice herself was sentenced in absentia, and her lands were presumably forfeited—which some writers on the case suspect was the basic motive behind the accusations of heresy. If this was the case, then it must have been a satisfaction to Dame Alice—safe in England—to hear that Ledrede himself was subsequently accused of heresy, made his way to Avignon to see the Pope, and had all his lands seized by the Crown in the meantime. He was acquitted, only to be accused again ten years later and again deprived of his lands and possessions. No doubt Dame Alice was making wax images of him and sticking pins in them.